About Steam Summer Sale
By now you’ve probably seen SteamSpy’s stats for Steam Summer Sale. It’s huge.
At least 33 million games found new owners during those two weeks.
Some disclaimers first
Revenue estimates aren’t really accurate, because, as I’ve mentioned earlier, there are many ways to obtain a game on Steam. Also, at least 20% of those games are sold in countries with special pricing, sometimes at half of the US price. And don’t forget that SteamSpy considers “Call of Duty X: Singleplayer” and “Call of Duty X: Multiplayer” to be different games. That’s around $4.5M and 150 thousand copies.
Some games were bundled roughly at the same time. For example, Schrödinger’s Cat And The Raiders Of The Lost Quark was part of Humble Kitty Bundle. And that’s probably where it sold most of its reported 15 thousand copies.
It’s not really fair to include ARK: Survival Evolved into Steam Summer Sale figures because it’s a new release. Yes, it was featured, but it wasn’t actually discounted (they’ve just extended a launch offer) and it would sell well anyway regardless of Steam Summer Sale.
But, nevertheless, even if you account for all these SteamSpy shortcomings and errors,
Steam Summer Sale made at least $160M in revenue.
Told you, it’s huge.
Now for some useful numbers
Anyway, counting other people money wasn’t my intention when launching SteamSpy, so let’s get something more useful out of this data.
Discounts
For example, an average maximum discount for this Steam Summer Sale was 66.63% — two-thirds off, amazing savings, really. I don’t have historical data to back it up, but I feel that we’re seeing a downward trend in pricing during Steam sales, when gamers expect games to be discounted more and more. Remember when Steam was selling games with 25% off and everyone was going mad?
So, the useful takeaway here is: get ready to discount a lot. I guess many indie developers will have to offer at least 66% off during Winter Sale.
While people are more likely to grab an interesting game if the discount is huge, please note that on average heavily discounted games make less money.
Median revenue varies from $40K for games with 75% discount to $75K to 66% and to $90K for 50%, 33% and 25% discounts (surprisingly, there is no significant difference between games with those discounts).
But that’s only for games included in SteamSpy stats — the ones that sold more than 5,000 copies. That’s roughly 1050 games out of 4390 games that were discounted during Steam Summer sale.
76% of games discounted during Steam Summer Sale
sold less than 5,000 copies.
Probably significantly less than that. The margin of error is so big when numbers are low, so I can’t say for sure.
UPD: Together those 76% of games made less than $9M in revenue — compare it with at least $160M in revenue for top 24%. Talk about Pareto principle.
Fake discounts
Some gamers argued that increasing a price for a game before discounting it later is a malicious practice. Grand Theft Auto V for example resorted to force bundling an in-game currency to artificially inflate the game’s price while Alone in the Dark: Illumination actually inflated an advertised price and then “discounted” it without offering any actual price decrease at all.
Thankfully, both games didn’t sell much during the Summer Sale, as gamers probably noticed this.
Some indie games that were released shortly before Steam Summer Sale advertised discounts that were, technically, false by European, Australian and probably US laws. If the product wasn’t actually sold at the advertised price for a reasonable time (28 days in Britain), the discount couldn’t be considered a “sale discount”.
I do understand that most of those developers had no malicious intent (and that’s why I’m not naming them here), but if this practice continues, Steam might face lawsuits from customer rights protection groups and government agencies around the world.
Please, don’t do this next time.
The sale effect
People buy more during sales. It’s well-researched phenomenon, so no surprises here.
Also, Steam users populate their wishlists to buy games during deals, so usually when you have several deals in a row, every next one is less successful than previous.
But Steam Summer Sale negates this effect. Even if you’ve discounted your game a month or so ago, you might still sell a lot (if the game is good, of course).
I honestly don’t know where are those people are coming from. Do they want a game enough to buy it, but not enough to add it to their wishlist? Or maybe they’re not familiar with wishlist feature and buy interesting games only when the sale is long enough to grab their attention.
It doesn’t work the other way around. It seems that it’s pretty hard to sell anything with a discount immediately after the Steam Sale, even if the discount is bigger than before.
Unless it’s a new game, of course. And even then it’s probably hard. Even ARK: Survival Evolved sales slowed significantly.
People are actually playing the games they’ve bought on Summer Sale
Gamers often are joking that Steam has become a meta-game where you pay money to add more icons to your collection. Everyone probably has a “pile of shame” of games they’ve bought but never bothered to play properly.
Well,
we saw 50% increase in total playtime for games outside the top 20
after Steam Summer Sale ended. People are actually playing those less popular games that they’ve probably acquired during the sale.
There was also a slight decrease in playtime for both Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (despite it selling almost a million copies during the sale), but it could be attributed to many other factors like, for example, Summer Holidays in Russian and Chinese schools.
Summary
Some takeaways:
- Steam Summer Sale is big, but most games don’t sell much.
- An average discount is 66%, but the bigger the discount, the less money you’ll make.
- People are playing the games they’ve bought during the sale, so it’s a good way to increase your userbase.
Do you want to know more?
If you’d like to learn more about Steam games and current state of its affairs, visit Steam Spy and follow me on Twitter.
